grantaire is in love with enjolras and enjolras is just wondering what this gremlin man is doing hanging around the friends of the abc so dang much and this upsets me greatly but not because i want them to kiss: an essay.
part one: “a group which barely missed becoming historic” -- or, unhealthy coping mechanisms galore.
for reference, this post is what set me off.
it’s not that i don’t agree with the contents of the post. i do. i just ... wanted to detail why it upsets me so much.
buckle up, friends, it’s gonna be a long one.
for part one we’re gonna break down grantaire’s descriptive intro (going off hapgood’s translation here), versus his action intro (that’ll be part two).
we’re gonna do every sentence of this. because just as he does with fantine, with javert, with every character, hugo likes to pack as many punches possible into every single word.
Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition.
vicky, buddy. i need more information. “juxtaposition” what? “juxtaposition” who? this is not specific. this is thematic, sure. but it gives no inkling of how he fell in with the amis, or why.
This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebus: R.
we get his name, and we get a pun. my garbage son is a nerd. grantaire -> grand r -> R ; but let’s go a little deeper here.
grand r (capital r) is pronounced the same as grand erre. which doesn’t make much sense grammatically speaking in french, so let’s just look at erre, the third person singular conjugation of the verb errer. errer: “to wander,” “to roam.”
errer is also one single vowel away from erreur: “error.”
grantaire wanders, he roams, (he loafs) ; he makes mistakes. perhaps he is a mistake. (we’ll get back to that later.)
Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.
this implies a certain level of effort. he takes care to avoid believing in anything in much the same way that bossuet and bahorel take care not to become lawyers.
not for the same reasons -- bahorel in particular, having been a veteran of lallemand’s funeral, views becoming a lawyer as becoming complicit in the oppression which lawyers and other bourgeois deal out. (this also puts bossuet’s funeral oration for blondeau in a very different light.)
so far, we aren’t given any reason why grantaire is a skeptic. all we know is that he puts effort into being skeptical. but in the same way that hugo forces us to make the connection between lallemand’s funeral and bahorel’s avoidance of lawyers by using only a sentence or two to describe it, so he treats grantaire’s avoidance of belief.
Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the Barriere du Com pat.
this fella is what i would call epicurean. the best coffee, the best games, the best chicken, cakes, wine -- he knows how to enjoy the good things in life. and purely from this little section, we can gather that he loafs probably just about as much as bahorel.
from “enjolras and his lieutenants” later on we can infer even more. he has a tiny monologue there when he describes, off the top of his head, the route he will take to get to the barrière du maine. it’s not much of a stretch to think that he knows the layout of the rest of the city on foot very very well.
he wanders. he roams.
while he doesn’t have as many political contacts as the rest of the group -- since he doesn’t have any political inclinations himself -- he probably knows just as many people as they do. he’s a social creature.
He knew the best place for everything; in addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough single-stick player.
i’m gonna quote an exchange i had with a friend on discord about this sentence here.
clio: ok so uhh singlesticks is LIKE fencing only with a fuckin uh, 3ft pole with a leather bucket on one end to protect your hand and the primary guard is you stand with your arm up over your head with the stick pointing at the other guy so first of all, arm strength and point goes to the head, not anything else, BUT everything else is fair game so if you + opponent are equally skilled and you both hate each other a little you can just spend 5-10 minutes in the ring beating each other black and blue until one of you gets tired and decides to end the fight with a tap to the head so just like ......... i just ..... hes described with a fuckjn, he knows boxing and chausson and a bit of dancing, and hes a profound singlestick fighter IF people rememver that bit its only the boxing they think of! I WANNA SEE R SMACKIN AND GETTING SMACKED WITH A STICK sam: that's so grantaire though... i don't know how to convey with typed words what i'm feeling right now clio: ? sam: an equivalent of fencing with poles instead of swords where there's only one way to score a point but everything else is allowed, leading to matches of people beating each other where they know they'll never score a point clio: oh fuck youre right grantaire: it's fun idk what you're talking about! joly: you have three cracked ribs. sam: the futility of the exercise but the skill needed to pull it off... clio: drawing it out painfully because at least thats more interesting than ending it quickly singlesticks originated in the highlands with scottish clans handing their 5 year old sons friggin sticks to teach them how to fight their feuds it isnt fancy and refined, it isnt stylish, it requires skill and speed and strength and it gets the job done, and its an outlet for destructive energy that is frowned upon elsewhere courfeyrac with his sword cane knows how to fence. grantaires got a stick. "il savait .. quelques danses" only the fast ones ill bet, i dont think hed have the patience for the slow ones all his patience would be reserved for drawing and even then it would have a time limit. buddy would rather eat the apples than draw them
also known as: y’all, get thee to google and find out if there’s a local hema (historical european martial arts) chapter near you. it’s a lot of fun and you get some practical experiences in there with it, if you’re the writerly type.
ALSO known as: grantaire can definitely hold his own in a fight.
he has skill, he has precision. he doesn’t just loaf, he lives. he is a corporeal being in every sense of the word.
if enjolras is fire and air, grantaire is earth and water. and this isn’t a bad thing.
He was a tremendous drinker to boot.
a single line. seven words. more words will be expended to describe this in various scenes later on, but for now, his alcoholism is only worth seven words.
He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows: “Grantaire is impossible”;
in the french the phrase is “il était laid démesurément” : he was immeasurably ugly, disproportionately ugly, cartoonishly ugly.
How Ugly Is He?
he’s So Ugly that pretty girls get mad about how ugly he is.
no, wait, hugo -- wait, that can’t be it, you spent a zillion words talking about javert’s physical description, about fantine, hell, about enjolras only a couple pages ago. you gotta tell us what kind of ugly grantaire is! tell us in words!!
but Grantaire's fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all: “If I only chose!” and of trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand.
nope. no physical description on that account. the audience is allowed to conjure their own version of ugliness and apply it to him.
and ... oh, buddy. he makes moon eyes at ladies, he tells his friends that they can’t keep their hands off him. we don’t see him with a woman except when he’s harassing the waitstaff at the musain and the corinthe, though.
i don’t know about y’all, but i kind of see this as trying to compensate for a certain level of insecurity. when you have people telling you that you’re impossible because of your physical appearance, maybe sometimes you decide to pretend you’re the handsomest guy in the room just to give everyone else a safer target to aim at.
(it’s not a healthy coping mechanism. but ... yeah, we’ll get to that too.)
All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his axiom: “There is but one certainty, my full glass.” He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. “They are greatly in advance to be dead,” he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: “There is a gibbet which has been a success.” A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly: “J’aimons les filles, et j’aimons le bon vin.” Air: Vive Henri IV.
this is bundled into one bit because breaking them down sentence by sentence amounts to the same thing:
he shuts himself off from politics, he dismisses them, because he would rather not think of them. he treats political ideology the same way he treats familial ties: hapgood says he sneers at them, and hugo says “il raillait” -- which ... holy moly, okay, let’s unpack that for a second.
“il raillait” -- he mocked, he jested, he taunted, he railed against it.
hapgood, what the fuck?
to mock familial and political ties, alright, fine. to make teasing jokes about them, cool, trackin’. to rail against them ...
please please please tell me i’m not the only one who can see there’s a level of personal bitterness implied there.
and with this, tucked into the skepticism and quite easy to overlook, we have a snippet of underlying depression. “they are greatly in advance to be dead”? if he was alive today, you can bet he would be crown to toe top-full of suicide jokes.
it hurts him to believe in something. so rather than allowing himself to feel that pain, he shuts himself down from believing in anything.
did i mention how he doesn’t do the healthy coping mechanism thing well?
However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.
oh boy. here we go.
first up: it’s perfectly fine and normal to admire a person you love. it’s perfectly fine and normal to love someone.
it is not normal to venerate someone you know personally.
to venerate: to exalt: to worship.
friends, this is pedestal-putting the likes of which we see in Nice Guys (tm) which makes our hackles rise, is it not? because we are people, and we don’t want to be treated like goddesses, because inevitably we will break that illusion and part of the relationship will shatter too as a result?
this is a train wreck waiting to happen.
To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors.
scrapes hands down face.
cripes.
take careful note of the use of the word “subjugated” here. this is a direct cognate to the french.
i beg you not to find this romantic.
does enjolras mean to subjugate him? no. definitely not. but does enjolras consistently act in a manner which actively rejects anyone who does not actively seek to advance his cause? yes. very much yes.
grantaire does not seek to advance his cause. he does not believe in enjolras’ cause. he only believes in enjolras -- and out of the sheer force of his personality, not out of anything else.
he venerates enjolras because of his personality. and enjolras subjugates him -- or grantaire purposefully puts himself in that position -- because they are opposites. in using complementary colors as a mini motif, hugo implies that one is valueless without the other. however ...
That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras.
... hugo lays out pretty blatantly that he thinks belief is better than skepticism. light, height, heaven, flight. blindness, baseness, the earth, being earthbound.
i mentioned before that if enjolras is fire and air, grantaire is earth and water. that’s balance there, that’s complementary colors. push and pull, light and dark, life and death. one needs the other, and vice versa.
for hugo -- as far as enjolras and grantaire are concerned -- darkness needs light, but light does not need the dark. there is no vice versa. there is no equal exchange.
enjolras does not need grantaire in any way. when talking of who completes enjolras, hugo speaks of combeferre, philosophy and humanity. he speaks of courfeyrac, the warmth, the center. the triumvirate balance each other out. grantaire doesn’t even enter into the equation.
grantaire is the shadow on the wall of plato’s cave; enjolras is that which casts the shadow.
grantaire is error, and enjolras is truth.
That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct.
given that grantaire finds it painful to believe in anything, it’s completely understandable that he would be attracted to someone who can believe so vehemently, including -- maybe even especially -- revolutionary republicanism.
so far so logical. but i smell a rat ...
His soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more.
... and there it is.
here is the problem.
lack of ideals is an issue that grantaire has, certainly. but it is a carefully cultivated lack. remember: “[he] took good care not to believe in anything.”
atheism is a religious choice just as much as any other, y’all. same thing applies here.
if there is a void inside grantaire, it is one he hollowed out himself. and it is not enjolras’ job to fill it.
and grantaire already is somebody, even when enjolras isn’t around! he knows the best place for billiards! and spatchcocked chicken! and thin white wine! and he knows a few dances! and he’s a thorough singlestick player!
that adds up to a whole person! one who, i might add, is not entirely consumed by his beliefs every waking hour the way that enjolras “chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the republic” seems to be!
He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted.
here it is again: grantaire is a whole person, because he has hobbies and likes and dislikes, and he has friends. and he loves his friends.
he has no ideological convictions, but he loves, which is in itself a conviction. alright: he is contradictory. that’s okay. it means he is human.
he is somebody all by himself.
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.
no. no no no noooooo. NO!!!
HUGO. LOOK AT WHAT YOU IMPLIED JUST BEFORE THIS. NOW LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE JUST WRITTEN. DO YOU NOT SEE HOW IT IS YOU’VE JUST SNEERED AT THE VERY CHARACTER YOU’VE ESTABLISHED?
look. i absolutely get that hugo is going for that homoerotic vibe. that is EXACTLY what he is doing here. he might as well be shouting it with a megaphone. he couldn’t be more obvious than if he was making a comparison to ganymede, zeus’ personal boytoy cupbearer.
but just like women do not exist solely in their attachment to men (re: cosette and the problem of There Can Only Be One Man In My Life), neither do mlm exist solely in their attachment to their lovers.
(note, here, that every homoerotic example hugo provides is one which the classical scholars argued as being the “beloved”, not the “lover” -- i.e., the passive one in the relationship, and not the pursuer.)
grantaire is enjolras’ opposite, sure. sure. i can hang with that. but he is not a sequel. he is not an appendage. he is his own person.
One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.
neat little literary trick there, buddy, i see you. and yet!
i did a lil research on this and boy does it only make me madder. apparently, pylades only has a handful of speaking lines in aeschylus’ oresteia, if that. he exists as orestes’ helpmeet in the vengeance he takes, and that is all. “passive” doesn’t even begin to explain it. pylades only has scenes when orestes has need of him. and once orestes exits the story, pylades vanishes without a trace.
the clear implication being that as pylades is to orestes -- minion, friend, beloved -- so too is grantaire to enjolras. or at least, so he wants to be ...
Grantaire, Enjolras’ true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.
... but that isn’t quite right. because again, grantaire has been shown to exist as a person outside enjolras. he has hobbies, he has friends. he adheres himself to enjolras, but he cannot be as pylades to enjolras’ orestes, because he exists outside enjolras’ revolution. and his very first scene in the back room of the musain is one in which he does not interact with enjolras at all.
Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of Enjolras: “What fine marble!”
and here we finally have enjolras' thoughts on the matter: disdain and a little lofty pity.
tell me -- when you love someone, do you want them to pity you? to look down upon you from high above, and say, “ew, gross,” and then move on with their life?
please. please look at the word choice here. harshly treated. roughly repulsed. rejected. unaccepted.
is enjolras wrong to treat him this way? kinda no. grantaire belittles his cause, he takes up his friends’ attention by not shutting up for five pages at a time, he volunteers to help but then doesn’t follow through.
but also kinda yeah. enjolras is a jerk to grantaire. he asks him if it’s possible he can be good for something, rhetorically, with the answer obvious in his mind that grantaire is good for nothing. he tells him he is incapable of believing, of thinking, of wanting, of living, and of dying. for now we aren’t given any specifics, but again -- the language here, harshly treated and roughly repulsed, tells us that enjolras isn’t nice about it at all.
that shit hurts me, and i’m not even the one enjo is talking to.
enjolras probably isn’t aware that grantaire is in love with him. hell, hugo makes sure to tell us that grantaire isn’t even fully aware of his own feelings. but ...
... grantaire. honey. when someone rejects you, when someone treats you harshly, the healthy thing to do is to stop putting yourself in their path.
this is the one instance in which grantaire seeks out that which he knows will cause him pain, instead of numbing himself ahead of time to prevent it.
again and again he puts himself in a position to be rejected, without even knowing why.
this is the part where i devolve into wordless pterodactyl shrieking.